. . . And here’s the birds! that great you from the street. People do stop to look at them and read their sad story.

4

As I made alot of these little guys – and big ones too, Mick and I started to call our house, the “bird factory.” It really was set up like a factory with buckets of feathers and birds laid out in certain order.

5

You can just begin to see the text, trapped in a liquid-appearing epoxy, that people would stop and read from the street outside the gallery.

6

“Down the River . . .” started in Pittsburgh at the head of the Ohio and took us down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Two narratives ran along these rivers. The one you see here is the reports people called into the U.S. Coast Guard in 2013 -14 of toxic dumping and spills along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

With the slogan, All Eyes on Art, the PGH4ART team, an artist-led group of students, organizers, and activists called on city lawmakers to enforce Pittsburgh’s Percent for Art Law, which requires 1% of publicly-funded construction and renovation projects to be set aside for the creation of public art. It hasn’t been enforced since its inception in 1977. This letter to the editor at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette lays out the issue and its context in detail.

In every election cycle we publicly debate on what is and is not working about our government. With candidates vying for our votes, we discuss the performance and methods of elected officials. The PGH4ART Team is using Pittsburgh’s mayoral election as a social space in which we can effectively bring All Eyes to a city law that has lain dormant since 1977. The Team is working with the Hill District Consensus Group, Fight Back Pittsburgh, and students from CAPA High School in support of the campaign. At the May 2013 demonstration at Katz Plaza, our street team collected signatures for the petition while our online organizers got the word out via Twitter,Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

“Art as part of the social landscape has a profound impact on communities,” said Shannon Pultz, the head of CAPA High School’s visual art department. “Study after study shows that the amount of art equals the amount of vibrancy of city life,” and sure enough mayoral candidate Bill Peduto and city council candidate, Dan Gilman, were in attendance at Katz Plaza. The All Eyes on Art event was discussed in a political rather than an art context in both the Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh City Paper. Heading into the November election, candidates for Pittsburgh Mayor and City Council answered in-depth questions about enforcement and implementation of the 1977 law. They have been published by the City Paper.

An eye opening meeting last night at the Jewish Community Center. Facilitated by our Councilman, Doug Shields, Squirrel Hill area residents aired their grievances to Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, Nine Mile Run Association, ALCOSAN, and City of Pittsburgh Public Works. The big picture is: due to the consistent rise in temperature, northeast cities have seen an upswing in dramatic rainwater events – for which our city’s infrastructure is ill-equipped. Residents testified to cleaning up human poop from combined sewage run-off in their yards and in their homes.